Game info: Wikipedia
Listening/music info: soundtrack album
Info
Two new Katamari games in the same year! Truly we are blessed, though I’m not really including myself in “we” here because I’ve never played a Katamari game before. This is a more general release for consoles and PC, so people who aren’t locked into the Apple ecosystem can play it, unlike Katamari Damacy Rolling LIVE from earlier in 2025.
The soundtrack is separated into three discs by music type. The first disc is where all the songs live and this is very much in the classic tradition of Katamari music: an eclectic, quirky, generally pop-flavored collection of vocals spanning electronic, rock, orchestral, and jazz/funk styles, with some occasional instrumental tracks. Most of the Rolling LIVE composers returned to contribute more songs, along with several other, older Namco composers and a few from music production company MONACA. I mentioned in my Rolling LIVE review that the music there overall had a bit more of a younger, more modern sound in the electronic production than past soundtracks, and there’s still a good amount of that in Once Upon thanks to the shared staff, but there are more throwback-sounding songs here too; the fact that Rolling LIVE’s vocalists were all younger folks and they brought back some of the older vocalists like Shigeru Matsuzaki and Kenji Niinuma for Once Upon also makes it feel a bit less modern. I did prefer Rolling LIVE’s more modern sound, though, so I wasn’t really as big a fan of the songs this time around.
Disc 2 is all instrumental BGM. The story of this game involves traveling through different time periods, and a lot of the music on this disc is themed in the ways you’d expect: you’ve got shamisen in the Edo Japan music, you’ve got Middle Eastern-sounding scales in the ancient Egypt music, you’ve got a lot of percussion in the Stone Age and Jurassic music, you get the idea. Rather than go fully in on stereotypical genres, though, most of them are hybrid electronic tracks with chippy/synth instruments in there too, which is a fun way to cross off all the checkboxes while still retaining some musical identity; the fact that a lot of these were written by Shogo Nomura, a certified Cool Dude™, certainly helps to keep things entertaining by mixing in big chords and staccato/glitchy electronic production. I enjoyed this disc a little bit more than the first one.
Disc 3 has karaoke versions of the songs from disc 1, and then a bunch of orchestral “Drama” suites which I’m assuming are cutscene music. These were all done by MIYAKEYUU STUDIO, which is evidently distinct from the man Yuu Miyake, who contributed a few tracks under his own name (at least one other person apparently works for him, Koichi Abe). They’re fairly short and feature a lot of the same cues so there’s overall even less music, but I thought they weren’t bad! They’re a bit reminiscent of traditional cartoon scoring, not fully Mickey Moused but clearly broadly synchronized with the goings-on of whatever’s going on in the cutscenes as they randomly switch moods every ten seconds. Not the most sophisticated orchestra pieces by any stretch, but there’s some decent writing here and there for what they are. I’ve never heard anything by Yuu Miyake that’s even close to these, but I’m not going to pretend that I’m overly familiar with him, so maybe he has in fact gotten orchestral before.
Recommended tracks:
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“skyscraper(s)” (Keiichi Hirokawa, vo. Amane Uyama) is mostly an ’80s synthpop throwback, but there are a couple of modern DTM moments like 0:37
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“Katamari Damacy” (Satoru Kosaki, vo. Clémentine) is French
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“Suisei Biyori” (Shogo Nomura, vo. suis) is pretty standard Nomura maximalist pop
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“Center of the Katamari” (Yoshihito Yano) has one nice chord in its progression
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“Ancient Greece” (Shogo Nomura) was my clear favorite of the regional themes, hehe funny lauoto glitching
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“CLASSICME” (Sho Okada) was the most sinister-sounding track in the game
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“ICE CUBE SOUL” (Junichi Nakatsuru) is a ludicrous jazz fusion banger that comes out of nowhere, they let Nakatsuru out of his cage to write something like this once every five years
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“The King’s Drama Ep.4” (MIYAKEYUU STUDIO) is one of the longest of these tracks, so now you know exactly what they all sound like pretty much
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